Library & Information Technology Services » Alex Chapinhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis
Middlebury CollegeMon, 02 Mar 2015 14:26:05 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Curricular Technology J-term Workshops for Facultyhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/12/19/curricular-technology-j-term-workshops-for-faculty/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/12/19/curricular-technology-j-term-workshops-for-faculty/#commentsMon, 19 Dec 2011 23:09:06 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=27575LIS Technologists and Liaisons will be offering more workshop in J-term on Moodle and WordPress, as well as general technology work sessions where faculty can get assistance on using any platform supported by LIS. There will also be workshops on migrating Segue sites to these other platforms. For more information, see: Segue from Segue > Workshops

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/12/19/curricular-technology-j-term-workshops-for-faculty/feed/0Aesthetics of the Moving Imagehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/12/08/aesthetics-of-the-moving-image/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/12/08/aesthetics-of-the-moving-image/#commentsFri, 09 Dec 2011 02:23:43 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=27490Louisa Stein is an assistant professor of Film and Media Culture. In the spring of 2010, I interviewed Prof. Stein about her use of technology in a number of her courses. Below is a screencast from that interview that describes her use of WordPress and Moodle in a first year seminar course on the “Aesthetics of the Moving Image.”.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/12/08/aesthetics-of-the-moving-image/feed/0Course Hub Case Studieshttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/12/01/course-hub-case-studies/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/12/01/course-hub-case-studies/#commentsThu, 01 Dec 2011 23:09:34 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=27434The Course Hub is being actively used by a variety of courses this fall. To give a sense of the different ways faculty are using this new platform, we’ve made a short screencast that shows a number of courses and some the resources they have linked to their course hub sites.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/12/01/course-hub-case-studies/feed/0Curricular Technology Workshops in Decemberhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/12/01/curricular-technology-workshops-in-december/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/12/01/curricular-technology-workshops-in-december/#commentsThu, 01 Dec 2011 16:30:39 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=27406The Curricular Technology team has scheduled workshops and work sessions for faculty on various platforms that are available for teaching and learning. Workshops typically provide overviews of a given platform. Work sessions are designed to provide hands on support and consultation.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/12/01/curricular-technology-workshops-in-december/feed/0Weekly Web Development Round-up November 4, 2011http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/11/04/weekly-web-development-round-up-november-10-21-2011/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/11/04/weekly-web-development-round-up-november-10-21-2011/#commentsFri, 04 Nov 2011 20:00:53 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=27167To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.

Drupal

We’ve been able to successfully import content from the College Archives into Drupal using the Feeds OAI-PMH module which connects to CONTENTdm and pulls in all of the record metadata in the Dublin Core fields. This allows us to display views of information from the archives in Drupal, like a list of lectures in the Digital Lecture Archive.

Mobile/Portal

The Events calendar on the Current Students site now includes events from both the Featured Events and Student Events calendars. Thanks to our colleague Kristina in Events Management for putting together this combined calendar.

We’ve added a Weather module which include a five day forecast from WeatherUnderground.com based on data from our on-campus weather station. The Weather module also includes photos from our MiddCams.

The Featured News module (renamed from “MiddPoints”) now includes posts from MiddNotes and MiddPoints.

Thanks to user feedback the mobile/portal directory now includes office hours in the result details.

We’ve added an icon to link to WebMail from the mobile site’s homepage.

We’ve added a Giving icon to the mobile site’s homepage.

GO
Bug fixes to GO so that checking to see if there is a duplicate admin takes into account the institution of the code (MIIS or Midd).

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/11/04/weekly-web-development-round-up-november-10-21-2011/feed/0Weekly Web Development Round-up October 10-21, 2011http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/10/21/weekly-web-development-round-up-october-10-21-2011/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/10/21/weekly-web-development-round-up-october-10-21-2011/#commentsFri, 21 Oct 2011 21:00:28 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=26964To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.

Main site and mobile site speed improvements

Our main website and mobile website make fabulous use of data feeds from blogs, calendars, Twitter, and other sources to provide up-to-date news and information to users of the sites. Some pages in the main site have as many as 3 feeds in the carousel at the bottom of the page and another 2 feeds in sidebars. The mobile site displays 7 feeds on its home page for desktop users.

Unfortunately displaying all of these feeds on the site was causing performance problems for users when those feeds needed to be refreshed. Even if the blog system returns each feed in under a second, that time adds up and was making users wait for 10 seconds or more for some pages to load.

We are happy to announce that we have now resolved this issue by piping all of our data-feed access through a system we call FetchProxy. FetchProxy sits between Drupal and the source of the data feeds and keeps a fresh copy of the feed always available so that Drupal never has to sit and wait for feeds. Pages that once took more than 10 seconds to load, now load in 1-2 seconds. You can read more about FetchProxy on Github.

Campus Map

We’ve updated the interface for our Campus Map with the help of designers in College Communications. New features include a list of locations with quick icons to help you find special locations, a search interface, an improved photo gallery, and more special filters which allow you to scope the locations on the map. For instance, you can get a map of all the locations on campus with Wireless.

MiddMedia

A permalink is now available for each file in MiddMedia. You can access it for a particular video you click the “Embed Code & URLs” next to any video you are browsing in MiddMedia and click on the “Click here to view and/or download this file.”. Alternately you can construct this URL like this “http://middmedia.middlebury.edu/middmedia/view/dir/[the directory where the file is located]/file/[the name of the file with its extension]

This is useful if you want to reference your video without embedding it elsewhere.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/10/21/weekly-web-development-round-up-october-10-21-2011/feed/0Weekly Web Development Round-up October 3-7, 2011http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/10/07/weekly-web-development-round-up-october-3-7-2011/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/10/07/weekly-web-development-round-up-october-3-7-2011/#commentsFri, 07 Oct 2011 21:00:02 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=26917To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.

Web Portal

M.middlebury.edu, home to our mobile portal and web portal has recently seen an update to the web portal customization options. This includes the ability to customize portal panels in the left and right columns independently. Panels can now be chosen from the full list of currently available modules. You still have the option to toggle default modules off and rearrange modules. This goes for the modules that appear in the navigation and the ones that appear as panels on the home page.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/10/07/weekly-web-development-round-up-october-3-7-2011/feed/0WordPress Workshopshttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/10/04/wordpress-workshops-3/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/10/04/wordpress-workshops-3/#commentsTue, 04 Oct 2011 20:42:08 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=26886WordPress is a platform for creating a wide range of web sites, including this one. A number of workshops on WordPress have been scheduled in October.

WordPress Introductory Workshop

This workshop is open to anyone who is interested in learning more about WordPress.

WordPress Work Sessions

We have also scheduled a number of work sessions on WordPress, as well as Moodle. These work sessions are designed to provide hands on assistance to anyone who is working on a site or has specific questions. Here are dates/times:

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/10/04/wordpress-workshops-3/feed/0Weekly Web Development Round-up September 19-23, 2011http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/23/weekly-web-development-round-up-september-19-23-2011/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/23/weekly-web-development-round-up-september-19-23-2011/#commentsFri, 23 Sep 2011 20:35:43 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=26850To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.

Site Performance

We don’t have many new features to announce this week, other than the previously announced addition of Photo Rosters to the Course Hub. Instead, we’d like to let you know about a few improvements we’ve recently made to overall site performance. We recognize that editing the site has been very slow since early in August and got worse with the start of classes. When we upgraded database servers over the summer a caching optimization that we’d made to the previous server wasn’t transferred to the new one. This optimization has been re-applied and the server should now perform better.

We’ve also made several improvements to our application code that will increase performance. We noticed that the calendars from 25Live were giving a unique code to every visitor. This made it impossible for our server to use the cached version of the page that is normally sent to non-editors after they’d viewed a calendar on our site. That unique code is no longer set. Additionally, all RSS feeds on the site are now cached for three hours, so that feeds like the Home Page Stories, which normally take 10-15 seconds to generate can be delivered in a few milliseconds instead – this in turn improves performance on our mobile site. Don’t worry though, whenever a new story is created we drop the cached version of the feed and create a new one so you’re always seeing the freshest content, just like we do with the Athletics site whenever the scoreboard is updated.

There was also a short interruption of service in the Course Hub yesterday. We’ve discovered the cause and corrected the issue so that it will not occur again.

Dining Menu Feeds

We’ve had this feature in place since the beginning of the semester, but haven’t told you about it. You can now get the Dining Menu as an RSS or iCal feed. iCal is a calendar data format that you can use to subscribe to the Dining Menus in Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, the Mac OS X iCal application, and many other calendaring applications.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/23/weekly-web-development-round-up-september-19-23-2011/feed/0WordPress in the Liberal Artshttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/22/wordpress-in-the-liberal-arts/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/22/wordpress-in-the-liberal-arts/#commentsThu, 22 Sep 2011 18:44:54 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=26821Last week I attended a Nercomp event on WordPress in the Liberal Arts in Norwood, MA and participated in a panel on WordPress themes and plugins with colleagues from the College of Wooster and Abilene Christian University. About 45 people attended, most from institutions that were already using WordPress. Many of these same institutions were also using Moodle and Drupal.

WordPress is used by many for course sites. Abilene Christian University has integrated it with Banner making it easy for their faculty to create class blogs that automatically include students. The College of Wooster has an instance of WordPress referred to as Voices, that includes BuddyPress and bbPress, popular WordPress plugins and associated platforms that add functionality for creating groups and forums and aggregating activity streams across various sites. Mark Frydenberg from Bentley University teaches his students how to maintain a WordPress site, requiring each student to take on the role of site administrator and tasking them with changing the site theme, adding plugins and managing roles.

Some institutions are using WordPress for e-portfolios. Macaulay Honors College has over 1,500 sites in EPorfolios@Macaulay, which also makes use of BuddyPress to create various groups that they plan to include in their upcoming WordPress student portal, My.Macaulay. Some institutions even use WordPress for the college website including Bates, Lafayette and Wheaton.